This month I’m taking part in the A-Z Challenge! Which means I’ll be writing 26 posts (on set days through the month) each one corresponding to a letter of the alphabet. Today is day 24, which means letter X (which is a nightmare letter lol!).
My theme for the month is: Secret Diary Of A Serial Killer. Each post will be a new chapter in the story – I’m really excited to finally get this novel idea out of my head and into words. I hope you enjoy it! 🙂
Previous Chapter: Wetwork Start from A: Anna
Xanthium
Neither of us spoke as we removed Capinski’s clothes and put them in a garbage bag. We carefully rolled him in the plastic sheeting, folding the ends inward to tightly pack him up. Johnny had duct tape in his car too – which gave me even more questions I wanted to ask – so we could seal the plastic pretty tightly. I picked up the rope that had been thrown at me earlier and we used it to get a better grip to carry the bundle closer to the door.
“So how did you find me?” I said, breaking the silence.
“The tracker I put in your phone,” Johnny said.
“Capinski left my phone here?” I looked around to see if I’d missed it.
“Oh, no,” said Johnny. “Your phone is in the middle of a lake. I guess he left you here when he went to dump it?”
I nodded.
“Well, he took the small tracker from your pocket back to the bus station, then your phone went for a swim a few miles away. So I drove to the last place both trackers were in the same place: here,” he said, smiling.
“With plastic sheeting and duct tape. And a baseball bat,” I said, raising an eyebrow.
He shrugged.
“Someday, you and I should talk about what you do,” I said.
He smiled. “Someday.”
“Capinski said this was his place,” I said. “Some kind of inheritance. I’m not sure how much I believe him though.”
“I ran a search on the address on my way here. It’s someone’s inheritance, but right now it’s in probate. I can do more digging, I was a little preoccupied getting here quickly,” he said.
I laughed. “And thank you for that. Really.”
He nodded then motioned towards Carly. “We should get rid of his body before she wakes up.”
We carried him to Johnny’s car. He opened the trunk and I saw it was already lined with plastic sheeting.
“Seriously?” I said.
“Someday, remember?” He said, smiling, and lifted Capinski’s shoulders over the edge of the trunk.
I picked up his feet and we pushed him in. I saw a shovel in the cellar, so Johnny ran back to get it and we drove deeper into the woods.
The dirt track started to fade away to just pine needles, so we pulled into a darker patch of trees and got to work digging a hole for Capinski’s body. The area was covered with sharp prickly plants – the seeds sticking to our clothes. Neither of us minded, we’d be burning our clothes later anyway.
When the hole was deep enough we unwrapped Capinski and dumped his naked body in. stuffing the plastic into a trash bag, which we put into the trunk of the car for burning with the clothes.
Covering a body with dirt is much simpler than digging the hole, and in no time we had the area looking untouched, with pine needles and spiky seeds dispersed over the soil to cover the grave.
On the drive back to the house I tried to figure out what to tell Carly.